Mod Edit: A word was substituted with a synonym. Do not use the removed word, or its lineage, on our forums or discord.
You know, the word that starts with META and the word moron are not synonyms at all. They mean completely different things.
You don't have to be stupid to be the kind of person they were talking about. Charles Babbage was like that - and nobody ever accused the creator of the Difference Engine of lacking intelligence. It's about an attitude towards works of art and fiction, not about smarts.
So, like, what attitude are we talking about?
(Sorry but I know nothing about Charles Babbage so I dun get the reference.)
Charles Babbage loved number tables, punched cards and musical scores. He found them pleasant to the eye. Eg, when he looked at a musical score, he would admire the elegant harmony of lines and dots and praise how they connect to each other. Since he liked looking at scores, he claimed to like music. However, if somebody actually started playing music when he was around (on a guitar, a piano, whatever) he would go red with anger and yell: "Stop that infernal racket!"
Some people like manga the way Babbage liked music. They see lines and dots and constructs of tropes, all of which can be measured and tabulated, and then they can analyze and compare the tables and deduct all sorts of little results. However, when they see us immersing ourselves in a story and enjoying ourselves immensely, they start whining: "What are you doing?!? That's just fiction! Those places and people are not real!!"
They really think they're revealing important new information to us when they talk like that. These are some of the posts I've read in this here forum along the years:
"These girls are characters in a story! They can't be your friends! It's pointless to like them!"
"You're saying she should dump her lover and date her bestie? Sorry, mate, she can't hear you: she's made of pixels!"
"Wow, thanks for denouncing all his crimes, loud and clear! Too bad you'll never be able to drag him to your tribunal and judge him, coz he's not human, he's a character!"
"Oh so you love whatshername? You're crazy about her? Well I got news for you: she's not a real woman! She'll never love you back! Hah! Hah!"
Manga comics are like punched cards to these people. Where we see a fascinating, passionating recreation of life, they see tiny holes in a piece of card stock. When asked what the eff is wrong with their heads, they reply they're being META about this 'fiction' stuff. This is why writers in other forums started calling them... exactly that. That word. Plus the "-ard" suffix.
Everyone is entitled to have fun with manga whatever way they want, but it sure would be nice if these guys stopped trying to teach us, again and again, that manga stories are not for realsies. Because it does no good at all, and only pollutes the threads.